Unwrapping a Frosty World Tour in New York

It was more than just arctic frost from the polar vortex blowing through the air in New York last week. Adorned by Dickensian carolers and winter-themed plushies, Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour conjured up a confluence of intrigue, excitement, and questions at the Javits Center. As a “Summit Level” implementation partner, Arkus was out in full force, and here are four takeaways I would like to share.

Watching the Agentforce Snowflake Crystalize

If you arrived at this World Tour hoping to avoid Agentforce, you might have been in for a surprise. Like Elf on the Shelf, it was inescapable. Even if you dodged sessions explicitly about agentic AI, the rebrand of Salesforce’s products as all part of the “Agentforce suite” would have kept the word bouncing off the walls like a toddler who has eaten too many candy canes. Indeed, I spoke to several people who did not attend because they were uninterested in talking about AI. And it’s too bad they passed, because had they come, they would have gotten some important clarifications about these new tools.

Talking more about AI may not be for every organization out there yet, but much of the hesitation we’ve seen has come from a lack of understanding about what the new platform features can really do and assumptions around the work required to get started. Check out my earlier blog post on simple ways to workshop your readiness for AI for more on that.  

As for the World Tour updates, two stood out. First, Agentforce pricing is slowly but surely coming into focus. The consumption model has been refined enough to provide a clearer picture. And beyond that, Salesforce has begun sharing more pricing models this year that look more like the traditional “per user” fees to which their customers are more historically accustomed, providing far more cost certainty.

Second, Salesforce has begun integrating “Out of the Box” Agents into its newer products, offering “turnkey” AI that allows for rapid implementation and evaluation for organizations that want to actually see the value of Agentforce without first investing tens of thousands of dollars.

Salesforce leadership is betting that simpler, more transparent pricing, along with agents that can be activated quickly, will get more organizations excited about using Agentforce. 

Winter is Coming (but in a good way!)

To most Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) users, Agentforce for Nonprofits (née Nonprofit Cloud or “NPC”) has been brushed off as a “maybe some day” conversation. But over the past two and a half years, it has matured, both as a platform and a promise. With each release, it has gained new features and better under-the-hood plumbing to meet nonprofit needs. 

Building on that, this World Tour Salesforce has significantly ratcheted up on innovation that will not be included in the Nonprofit Success Pack with Out-of-the-Box nonprofit agents. Salesforce unveiled four agents available to all Agentforce for Nonprofit/NPC users: a “research prospect” agent, an assessments agent, a volunteer coverage and capacity agent, and a program management agent.

While Salesforce has told its NPSP clients they risk missing out on major AI enhancements and innovations if they don’t move to NPC, it is now showing more tangible benefits that NPC organizations have over NPSP. To ease migrations from NPSP to NPC, Data 360 and Agentforce 360 for Nonprofits offer new, more flexible arrangements to accelerate the ROI of mapping and moving their legacy data into a new Salesforce org.

This noticeably changed the conversations I was having with NPSP users at World Tour from a year ago. Last year, NPC was like the big family “Holiday Cruise” that rich families take, but not something THIS family does. Now the conversation has shifted to something more akin to, “We know we need to put up the Christmas tree and put lights on the house, so when’s the best weekend to do all that work?” The shift is subtle, but it is indicative of a major change underway in the ecosystem.

Rudolph vs. The Rest

Ok, first let me just air some things out: the whole Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer story is weird to me. He does not fit in, so he gets excluded, and then, when the cause for his exclusion turns out to be useful for his job, only then does everyone love him. It’s shady.

On the other hand, while Rudolph’s red nose is essential to leading the sleigh, it’s not like he was pulling the sleigh all by himself. Those eight reindeer were still supplying 89% of the brute force. In this way, Rudolph is definitely getting too much credit, leaving the other eight reindeer bereft of their hard-earned glory.

I think Agentforce is like Rudolph. It’s the leader of the pack and gets all the attention; the other eight reindeer are Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud), doing 90% of the work to make that sleigh fly. Data 360 is the real game-changer, making the shiny and exciting parts of Salesforce’s products practical.

The biggest Data 360 news at World Tour was the finalization of its acquisition of Informatica, which will bring new capabilities around how Salesforce helps move client data and metadata between sources, without needing to utilize API connections. Tools like Informatica have always been, and will continue to be, essential to expediting integrations and data migrations. So while this space will make you snoozier than Santa’s elves on December 26th after too many egg nogs, it is foundationally important to everything else Salesforce does.

Great Stocking Stuffer: ChatGPT Integration

I, along with so many, have exclaimed to myself and anyone within earshot of my work-from-home desk, “Why can’t I just have ChatGPT inside of Salesforce?

We just got a big step closer to making that a simple task. The Salesforce-OpenAI partnership, announced a few months ago, was given more details around the bidirectional integrations. Millions of users already regularly switch between Salesforce and ChatGPT. So what holiday goodie could beat an integrated experience and secure utilization to get the best out of both platforms? For many, visions of dancing sugar plum fairies got nothing on that.

And with that, I thank you for joining me on this holiday edition of the Arkus blog… and to quote everyone’s favorite portly chimney diver, “to all a good night!”